For how we live.
Warm steam feels good on a blocked nose, but the randomised evidence for heated, humidified air treating a cold shows no clear benefit. A humidifier is comfort, not cure — and a dirty one carries its own risk.
On ten monitored flights, passengers away from a sick traveller faced low transmission risk, and every air sample tested negative for common viruses. Measles is the exception that proves the rule.
Dust sampled inside 38 schools in Calama carried copper, arsenic, lead and molybdenum at levels that tracked the outdoor air — with almost no attenuation for arsenic and lead.
A Copenhagen team has just published the protocol for the first study designed to test whether reducing PFAS exposure changes anything. That it is still a protocol tells you where the evidence stands.
A placebo-controlled trial in 164 children reduced fine particles 64% and found no improvement in symptoms. A smaller crossover trial found a benefit, but only in children whose asthma was poorly controlled.
Eight primary schools in Porto and 40 homes in the Faroe Islands were sampled by different teams asking the same question: how much of a person's PFAS exposure never touches food or water.
A single word on a label can stand for dozens of unlisted compounds. A few, like formaldehyde, are established hazards; the claim that everyday scented products make the general public ill rests mostly on self-report.
Health agencies conclude there is enough evidence to tie indoor dampness and mould to respiratory symptoms and asthma. Controlling the water source, not identifying the species, is what the evidence points to.
Cooking with gas emits nitrogen dioxide indoors, and pooled studies tie it to a higher risk of childhood asthma. One US analysis attributes about one in eight cases to gas stove use — an association, not a proven cause.
A colourless gas that seeps from soil into homes accounts for a large share of lung cancers in never-smokers. The evidence for testing is strong; the risk rises smoothly with concentration, with no clear safe level.
The gas is colourless, odourless and produced by any fuel-burning appliance. Because the early symptoms mimic flu, a working CO alarm is the one defence public-health data support.